You Suck at SketchUp

Share

You Suck at SketchUp

McKee's SketchUp model for a bicycle trailer.

Photo: Matthew McKee

SketchUp lets you plot out everything from a closet reorganization to a new home addition. It's easy. It's free. It's fun. But instead of picking up the program, you've been spending your time puzzling over some half-formed treehouse plans. Don't worry. We've brought Matthew McKee, an interior designer with San Francisco bike companies like Mission Workshop, Specialized’s Globe Bicycles and Bicycle Coffee, in for a pep talk. McKee uses SketchUp daily to design everything from trade show booths to store layouts to bicycle trailers. Here are a few tips to help you dive in.

1. Use Photo Match to take measurements.

You could spend hours crawling around your living room with a tape measure. But instead, McKee uses a six-foot folding ruler and a digital camera. “I set the ruler in the corner of the space we’re designing, and take a nice clean photograph where I can see the corners of the ceiling and the lines on the floor,” says McKee. Upload the photo, match the horizon lines, trace the space and use the ruler to quickly input the dimensions.

2. Use Scenes to scroll between perspectives.

Start your drawing where the three axes—blue, red and green—meet, and keep your references consistent. “You might think you’re drawing a line up and down, and then you zoom out and orbit around and it’s going way out to nowhere,” says McKee. Use the Scenes function to create multiple tabs of different camera viewpoints and then shuffle back and forth. “Scenes is useful if your model gets really big and you don’t want to get lost.”

3. Use the Scale tool to halve your drawing time.

Most objects are symmetrical. So why draw both halves? Draw one half of the object, and then scale to -1 to create an exact negative copy. You can also use the Scale tool to change the shape of different objects. You can scale up couches or two-by-fours on a single plane to make them longer or taller.

4. 3D Warehouse is a great resource.

As a newspaper reporter, Hemingway took apart other people’s short stories to figure out how they worked. Similarly, deconstructing objects in SketchUp’s 3D Warehouse is a great way to learn how to draw. If you’re working on a specific object—for example, putting a titanium veneer on a bicycle—fiddle with bicycles that have already been drawn, rather than starting from scratch.